UPDATE: Arm reached out to us to confirm that Kirin 980 is based on Cortex-A76 and also added that Cortex-A77 does not exist.
Original story below:
Huawei will be unleashing the Kirin 980 chipset at the IFA 2018 tech expo that will take place in Berlin, Germany at the end of this month. A recent leak had revealed that Kirin 970’s SoC will be offering a maximum processing speed of 2.8 GHz. Rumors have also revealed that it will be built by TSMC 7nm manufacturing processor. Today, leaked screenshots of a Chinese benchmark tool have surfaced to reveal the entire specifications of the Kirin 980 SoC.
The screenshots show that the Kirin 980 will be an octa-core processor that includes four cores of Cortex-A77 and four cores of Cortex-A55. The clocking speeds of the main cluster is 2.8 GHz, but the processing speeds of the remaining cores are not known yet.
Earlier rumors had claimed that Huawei would be including its own GPU in the Kirin 980. However, it has been now confirmed that the Kirin 980 features Mali-G72 MP24 GPU that comprises twice the cores of 12-core Mali-G72 MP12 found in Kirin 970. The improved NPU M1 for handling AI tasks works at 1.6 TFLOPs.
Smartphones featuring the Kirin 980 can support a maximum screen resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels. The above screenshots further reveal features like support for two 32-bit LPDDR4X RAM, Cat. LTE 19 (downlink), Cat. LTE 13 (uplink), triple ISP, Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11ac. The above specs of the Kirin 980 may sound true, but popular industry experts are of the view that the above screenshots could be fake.
Hmmm.ARM has never released A77, it only has A76, and the Chinese media's rumors about it are mostly fake. https://t.co/o5LI3iXTK1
— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) August 14, 2018
As it can be seen above, well-known tipsters Roland Quandt and Ice Universe claim that ARM has never released Cortex-A77 CPU. Hence, the above leak could either be fake or ARM may announce Cortex-A77 at the upcoming IFA 2018. Hence, it is advisable to wait for concrete evidence to surface in the coming weeks to confirm on its specs.
Read More: Huawei Mate 20, Mate 20 Pro camera setup, codenames and juicy details leaked
The Kirin 980 SoC will be present under the hood of the Mate 20 and Mate 20 flagship phones that are speculated to debut in October. Rumors have it that both phones will be coming with features such as 3D facial recognition, triple camera system, 4,200mAh battery and up to 8 GB of RAM. The Mate 20 may feature a 6.3-inch notched display with a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner whereas the Mate 20 Pro may arrive 6.9-inch notched OLED screen and in-display fingerprint scanner.
